Freedom and statism in the battle for public opinion

The importance of ideas in shaping the future of human societies has been recognised by many thinkers, from Hegel and Marx to Weber and Mises. The motivation and the means to sway large groups of people have always existed. The ‘need’ for information control is so strong, especially for those who hold political power, that they dedicate major efforts to this task. It is impossible to understand the modern world, regardless of political persuasion, without grasping this reality.

The political drive to control public opinion

The political class of any society seeks to control the narrative because of the importance of public opinion for all political regimes. As Étienne de La Boëtie observed in ‘Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’ (1548), even the tyrant needs the implicit consent of the majority to secure his rule. Such consent becomes critical in a contemporary democracy, where political leaders legitimise their power by presenting themselves as representatives of the people.

Although the political forms have changed dramatically since the sixteenth century, the struggle against coercive power remains fundamentally the same. Freedom from state coercion is worth defending today no less than under the tyrannies of the past. Yet, the struggle for freedom takes place on an uneven playing field in a world where public discourse is founded largely on statist premises.

How statism captured key institutions

Statist ideas are promoted in society through three principal institutions: public education, mass media, and higher learning. As Friedrich von Hayek observed, the ‘professional second-hand dealers in ideas’ operating within these institutions help shape the ideas that reach the broader public. They are the journalists, pundits, and academics who filter, interpret, and popularise ideas in support of the powers that be. Many do this unwittingly, as Herman and Chomsky argued in ‘Manufacturing Consent’ (1988). Others, like the ‘court’ economists, consciously and proactively support statism.

Over the past century, these institutions have gradually come to be dominated by socialist and collectivist perspectives. They have succeeded not merely through sharp rhetoric and emotional appeals, but through a potent structural alliance: the State requires constant intellectual justification and support for its continuous expansion, while public intellectuals and institutions depend on the state for subsidies, prestige, and authority. As Public Choice theory shows, this institutional takeover has been driven as much by material incentives as by leftist ideological zeal embodied in the idea of the ‘long march through the institutions’.

The historical crises behind modern statism

Institutional incentives alone, however, cannot explain the success of statist ideas. Historical events also played a decisive role. The pervasiveness of statist ideology in contemporary public discourse was significantly helped by the crises of the twentieth century, particularly in Europe. The unprecedented propaganda apparatus set up during WWI was an important event in the state’s increasing control of public opinion. Later, many Europeans became impressed by the rapid yet brutal Stalinist industrialisation of the Soviet Union during the first and second Five-Year Plans (1928-1937).

At the same time, the Great Depression was conveniently, but erroneously, blamed on the free market – starting the myth of nefarious ‘unbridled capitalism’ that persists to this day. Then came WWII, which fostered the dangerous conviction across the West that state control of production was acceptable after all, since this had helped defeat Nazism. Once the war ended, the path was clear: Western electorates were thoroughly conditioned to accept political messages handing more power to the state through welfare state expansion and bureaucratic intervention in the economy.

As a result, the ideas of freedom were progressively reduced to a minority position, after having featured prominently in the public discourse during the Belle Époque.

Statist domination of political debate has been so successful that the public itself inadvertently advances socialist or collectivist talking points, believing these are obvious truths about political economy, uncritically reciting dogmas such as ‘markets require state supervision’ or ‘social justice demands redistribution’. The educational system and the media have long denied members of the public exposure to coherent alternatives to such formulas, even as such statist policies undermine the prosperity of their society and their own standard of living.

Freedom must overcome the cognitive challenge

It must be admitted that state interventionism holds a distinct psychological advantage over policies of freedom: it promises immediate, visible relief through subsidies, decrees, and handouts, while identifying convenient social enemies (e.g. the ‘bourgeois’, ‘capitalists’, and today, ‘billionaires’). Support for the ideas of freedom, however, generally requires at least some understanding of more abstract and counter-intuitive concepts, like spontaneous order, dispersed knowledge, and subjective value. As Frédéric Bastiat famously observed, sound economic analysis must consider not only ‘what is seen’, but crucially ‘what is not seen’ – an idea that is almost entirely absent from contemporary public discourse.

Austrian economics explains and clarifies such concepts, notably in Ludwig von Mises’ ‘Human Action’ (1949). Yet, in a world that now reads less and assumes more than before, freedom cannot hope to prevail in the battle of ideas if only political and economic textbooks are relied upon, however brilliant these are. The benefits of freedom and the consequences of statism must also be communicated through compelling, up-to-date content that is easily accessible to the younger generation, the one that will suffer the most from decades of statist policies.

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Libertis exists precisely for this purpose. By offering a principled voice of freedom within the European marketplace of ideas, Libertis provides a vital counterweight to the prevailing statist mentality. Its contribution comes at a crucial moment, as growing numbers of people are confronting the failures and exhaustion of statist interventionism. Since ideas play a significant role in shaping the future of societies, those who value freedom cannot afford to abandon the battle of ideas.